Living a balanced life as an entrepreneur or a leader takes intentionality. Without a commitment to your values, life insidiously becomes unrecognizable. Microstress seems to play a factor in how our lives seem to drift off course right before our eyes.
The term microstress can be misleading. While the specific stress is minor, the long-term consequences are enormous (Cross & Dillon, 2023). Big stress is the sort of stress recognizable by all of us. For example, a leader tasked with eliminating FTEs to meet budget cuts, taking care of an ill child, or moving across the country for a promotion.
By comparison, microstress is those little things that slip by seemingly unnoticed. For example, microstress could also be your manager asking you for information. Only you find out when you respond to your manager with the information they requested; they already have the information they asked for because your manager also asked one of your colleagues for that exact information. Or when technology isn’t working smoothly, you’re in a meeting, and your zoom suddenly doesn’t work, your frozen face on the screen and the sound cutting in and out, as everyone informs you that your voice sounds like a robot and they can only hear every other word. These are frustrating, irritating, disruptive, small, and everyday events.
Microstress is inconvenient, appears harmless, and relentlessly accumulates (Cross & Dillon, 2023). Microstress accumulates because these events are not significant enough to cause a fight/flight/freeze response. We just “deal” with them, allowing these microstress events to continue without attempting to correct how they occurred in the first place. In addition, microstress rarely is an isolated event; rather it starts a domino effect. So when zoom stops working, it doesn’t end there. The meeting needs to be rescheduled. There’s the time wasted presently, the time needed for the rescheduled meeting, the time needed to schedule the meeting, waiting on everyone to respond to the meeting invite and finally, there’s what you could have accomplished during both times that is still left undone (Cross & Dillon, 2023).
Then there is the emotional response to the event, like guilt or anger. Guilt at canceling plans or bitterness at realizing your time has been wasted. Our internal dialogue can feed these emotions because we start to add to the story. So, an event occurs, we make it mean something (the story), and then we keep thinking about the situation. For example, your husband calls and says he can’t pick up the kids today. You think, “Great. Now I need to reschedule a meeting. Do this work later. Why can’t he pick up the kids when he says he is going to. It’s going to be okay. I just need to get through this day”. Some of these emotions take time to pass and yet in the meantime, these emotions decrease our concentration, creativity and cause us to feel like we are never going to win in life.
In addition, there are the physical effects we experience in our bodies because of our thoughts and beliefs about the event. Our bodies keep score, starting another domino effect in response to the microstress by releasing cortisol, increasing blood pressure, heart rate, etc. This domino effect is termed “The Ripple Effect of Microstress” (Cross & Dillon, 2023, para. 11).
When you are being pulled into many different directions, having priorities frequently change, and urgent situations requiring immediate attention, having work/life balance can seem elusive. There doesn’t seem to be time to even reflect on how you are living because it is taking everything just to keep things afloat. You are too busy to figure out why you are too busy.
Here are a few common situations identified by Cross & Dillon that contribute to microstress (2023, para. 22):
- Misalignment between collaborators on their roles and priorities
- Unpredictable behavior from a person in a position of authority
- Collaborative demands that are diverse and high in volume.
- Surges in responsibilities at work or home.
- Confrontational conversations
- Lack of trust in your network
- People who spread stress
Here are some tips for ways to recalibrate one’s life.:
- Teach people how you want to be communicated with:
- How do you like to be interrupted, have plans changed on you or be updated on a project?
- What mode of communication do you prefer? Text? Email? Phone call?
- Touch things once.
- Don’t pick up the mail just to move it to multiple locations (i.e. kitchen, dining room, desk) allowing the pile to grow and your story about the pile to become dramatic (i.e. “I don’t want to open the mail). Instead, touch the mail one time. Pick it up, open it, put the junk mail in the trash and be done with it.
- Use your calendar as your to-do list. Using your calendar as your to-do list not only allows you to set up time to do the tasks you need to get done, but it also allows you to get super clear about how many hours there are in a day and what you can or cannot get done on a specific day. The next time you have something to write down on your to-do list, put it in your calendar.
- Notice when it is out of balance.
- The skill of “noticing” can be cultivated by practicing mindfulness. Think of Neo in the Matrix. Mindfulness can slow down reality just enough so you can choose. Noticing, “wow, my back hurts.” And then pausing to consider whether you should stand up, take a walk, or finish what you are working on rather than completely ignoring your body, only to discover three hours later you pulled a muscle. When you cultivate the skill of “noticing, ” you will start to notice when your body is feeling off, when your mood has changed, or when you start to feel a big emotion. This noticing allows you the opportunity to pause before making a choice.
- Breath
- When we are uncomfortable, many of us become breath holders. Next time you are dealing with an irritating situation, notice if you are holding your breath. Then intentionally take a deep breath. Taking deep breaths calms our bodies down, sending a signal to the brain that everything is okay. Breathing with intention can bring us back to the present moment and allow us to regain perspective.
- Frame a micorstress as a learning opportunity.
- Reflect on what happened, how you responded and if the result worked for you.
- Create time containers and then communicate with others.
- “I am working for 45 minutes with no interruptions from the cell phone, the computer or knocks on the office door”.
- “I am going to meditate for 10 minutes”.
Over the next few days, see if you can identify when microstress is happening in your life. Try to identify two events. Take time then to reflect on what structures you can put in place to support your boundaries, so you experience balance if that situation happens again. Remember, the first step is to notice when something is happening because then you can choose a response.
Reference:
Cross, R., & Dillon, K. (2023, February 7). The hidden toll of microstress. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved February 7, 2023, from https://hbr.org/2023/02/the-hidden-toll-of-microstress?ab=seriesnav-bigidea
